1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 47

March 1634

Cass Lowry grinned as he idly played with an AK3 chamber, thinking about his profits. He was indeed still working at the Gun Shop, and it was proving very profitable. From his reassignment to the Gun Shop back in January, he had been helping Andrei, not just in gun production, but in gun allocation. Because in Russia everyone was on the take and everyone could be bribed. He casually slid the chamber back into his bandolier. It was nice, that bandolier. Tooled leather with gold leaf, and it really set off his midnight blue jacket.

Well, almost everyone. There were half-a-dozen steam-ram drop forges in Murom, the seat of the Gorchakov family, and one at the Dacha. But Cass and Andrei couldn’t get any of those. There were too few for any to get “lost.” A steam-ram was a single-cylinder steam engine, but it had to be a high-pressure steam engine because of the amount of force it had to deliver to lift the incredibly heavy weight of the drop hammer. Made of metal and with the need to withstand hundreds of pounds per square inch, they were very hard for the smiths of Russia to make, so there still weren’t many available.

Slaves and serfs, however, were not a problem. The Sheremetev family and their deti boyars had lands all over the place and they were looking for things to put their serfs to work on over the winter. And they weren’t the only ones. In winter you could get the labor of serfs for little more than their maintenance. So the Gun Shop had gone with the serf-powered-crank drop forge rather than the steam-powered one. It took ten minutes to slowly crank the hammer up to drop height, but that was still three chambers or chamber locks an hour. Besides, the time it took to crank the hammer up gave the die time to cool between drops, and given the quality of the metal, a hot die wasn’t a good idea.

The crank version, though simpler than the steam-ram would have been, still took a couple of weeks to build. Russia had lots of rivers but the Gun Shop had no waterfalls handy. There were, though, lots of peasants and more than a few out-and-out slaves. So a two-man crank to lift the hammer, which had a die of pretty good high-carbon steel, was more than possible. The hammer dropped on an anvil, which had its own matching die, and wham, one semi-finished part. The flash, the excess material, had to be removed and the part had to be finished, but that could be done by hand.

There had already been a couple of puddle steel foundries when Cass had gotten here. And the Gun Shop had a high enough priority to get some of the steel and have it shaped into the dies they needed.

It was when they were working on getting the steel that Cass remembered the advantages of a high failure rate. Andrei had been complaining about the crappy progress of the drop forge for making the chambers. Too many of the chambers were not fully formed. Cass remembered something about a supply of black-market computer chips, some spy story or cop story, where the chips turned out to be being made in the factory that made the legal ones, but were marked down as defective, then sold. So they worked out a deal where the parts that were “not good enough” were sold as scrap to an iron monger. They ended up having to cut in the iron monger for a small piece of the action and a cousin of Sheremetev for a bigger one, but it worked. And Cass had had a down-time made Colt six-shooter with him when he’d arrived. So they started making those on the side, and they were selling faster than he could make them. Not that they could make them all that fast here in Russia. These people were even more primitive than the Germans.

The door slammed open, jerking Cass out of his daydreaming. “What is it?”

“We got a message from Moscow,” Andrei said. “A rider brought it.”

“Why didn’t they use the radio?” Cass asked. He and Andrei generally preferred to only deal with the spies they knew about. They weren’t fond of visits from Moscow.

“It’s broken. Again,” Andrei said. The radio network was new, incomplete, and full of problems. It was plagued with equipment failures because each and every radio was hand-built, as were the alternators that powered them. Andrei handed Cass the message.

Cass looked at it blankly. Cass couldn’t read Russian, as Andrei well knew. It was just one more of Andrei’s little digs. Just like the double bandolier Andrei was wearing. More tooling than Cass had, and way the hell more gold leaf. Cass had introduced the bandoliers less than a month after arriving at the Gun Shop and over the past couple of months they’d become all the rage. The advertisement of personal power and wealth that a bandolier full of chambers represented was irresistible to a certain class of Russian noble.

“General Kabanov wants to know when we will be delivering the shipment of AK3’s to the Moscow Streltzi. He’s getting impatient. If we don’t get them there soon, he’s liable to call for an investigation.”

“Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev will never let that happen,” Cass said. “He’s in this up to his eyeballs. We had to pay him enough. Tell Kabanov a month, just like we agreed. Look, Andrei, we’ve talked this out before. Everybody knows that we’re skimming. Only you, me and Ivan Petrovich know how much. This is brand new stuff. There’s no way for anybody outside to tell how many failures we have for every working gun. A fifty percent failure rate isn’t unreasonable. And a forty percent failure rate, with us skimming ten percent, that’s pretty good. Most of your guys aren’t going to realize how well the drop forges are working now. So we sell one gun for every gun we deliver and we make a fortune. We deliver two chambers with every gun and sell five, and we make another fortune. We keep it up a few years, then we retire to rich estates, just like we planned.”

Andrei was rubbing his hands together but it was clear to Cass that Andrei’s sense of entitlement was winning out over his caution.

“So we write General Kabanov a nice letter, telling him that we’ve had serious quality control problems, but we will, through long hours and hard work, soon have the full complement of two hundred rifles for the Moscow Streltzi.”

“And what do we tell him about the cannon?”

Cass winced. The cannon were a whole other issue. Cass wasn’t the most sensitive guy around and he had killed people in the heat of a fight and worked the servants hard in the Gun Shop, but the casual way Andrei sacrificed serfs and slaves to the development of new weapons had horrified him. Well, bothered him, anyway. The problem with the cannon was figuring out how many teeth an iron breechblock needed-or even a moderately high carbon steel one.

When Cass had arrived, Andrei was working up an interrupted screw ten threads deep. Vladimir had provided the basic designs. When a double-charge, the standard testing charge, was tried in the gun, it had blown the breech out as though it hadn’t had any threads. The breechblock had sailed like a cannon ball, bounced off the ground, shifting fifteen degrees to the right, torn through a wall twenty meters behind the gun, and killed four people. Kill was really too mild a word. It had pureed four people. Or at least the parts of them that had been in the way. The only good thing you could say about it was it had mostly been quick.

Andrei wanted to try a fifteen-thread interrupted-screw design next and that was what they had done. Andrei also wanted a Welin breechblock, but he couldn’t have one. The Welin was a complex breechblock with levels of threading so that more of the breech could be threaded. But while Russian craftsmen were good they were slow! slow! slow! in terms of making something as big and complex as a Welin block. Between the Russian craftsmen and the Dacha, they could make standard bolt-cutting and nut-cutting tools in the sizes needed, so the Gun Shop could cut the threads in the breech and the breechblock. But the sort of complex shaping necessary for the Welin would have to be done by hand. And it would take months for a single breech to be hand cut. They made do with an interrupted-screw. Cut the threads into the block and the breech, then grind down the threads so that the block could be slid into the breech and screwed a quarter turn to lock it in place. That meant they needed a longer block and more threads to hold the same amount of force and the metal they were using wasn’t as consistent in its strength as twentieth-century metals which-again-meant a longer, heavier block.

Cass’ first contribution had been the notion of starting with a quarter-charge and gradually increasing the charge till they got to the standard double-charge or the breech blew so they would be able to tell how much they needed. “After all,” Cass had argued, “with a breech loader we can open the breech and use a ramrod to clear the barrel if we need to.”

That had saved time by letting them know just how much of a charge was needed to blast out a fifteen-thread deep breechblock. It turned out that to be safe they needed a thirty-thread block and that made for a very heavy breechblock. It needed supporting gear and bearings to hold it up and make it movable. And it was what would be called in another universe a “three-motion” block. Rotate, pull out, swing aside-four actions in point of fact-because a blast shield had to be swung into place. Some of the charge leaked out the less-than-perfect seal between the breechblock and the bore of the gun. Enough to be deadly dangerous to the gun crew without the shield.

All of this made the process of loading the rifled piece cumbersome. Not, however, as cumbersome as loading a muzzle-loader. They were small-bore guns for the weight of shot they fired and because they were rifled, they had a smoother, straighter trajectory. But they were slow to make and expensive. The Gun Shop had two of the eighty-caliber light cannon ready and parts for four more, but it took weeks to finish and fit the breechblock and threading for each gun. They might have four ready by the end of May, but three was more likely.

Cass shook his head. “Tell him we’ll try, but we don’t expect to have four by the end of May or five by the end of June. We’ll send him the guns as fast as we get them made and we’ll go ahead and send the two we have to now so he can train crews on them.” Cass paused. “The volley guns are doing well. And we should have half-a-dozen of them by the end of May.” Fortunately the volley guns used the standard chamber and barrel of the AK3. It just used twenty-four of them in three rows of eight. All they needed was the plate that held the chambers in place and the mounting carriage. It would divert some of their on-the-side AK3 rifle production, but this way they could claim that the volley guns were the cause of the delay.